Via News Didi

Via News Didi equips students with media literacy skills and solutions journalism skills. Through the News Didi WhatsApp Chatbot, we want to provide students media literacy skills at scale.

At Via News Didi, we’re concerned that thousands of students are consuming news and information that is false, misleading and often harmful to their health- all without the skills to recognize and combat this problem/stay safe from this problem.

1. The information we consume affects how we think, feel and act. 

Media messages- be it polarising news debates, false COVID cures on WhatsApp, Blue Whale challenges on social media or even conspiracy theories on web chat forums- they all have harmful consequences in the real world. These consequences can take the form of vaccine hesitancy, negative body image and even real life violence (Pizzagate, 2016) 

2. Students are now consuming more (misleading) information than ever before.

With more students than ever before taking to the internet for learning, communicating with peers or just entertainment- it’s scary to imagine students at the receiving end of misinformation in a country where we find more fake news than anywhere else in the world. (Microsoft Survey, 2020)

3. We’re not trained to distinguish between false and accurate information. 

A recent study by the Stanford History Education Group found that although students were proficient on social media platforms, more than 80% could not distinguish between native advertising (“sponsored content”) and news stories. In India, even our recently updated National Education Policy 2020 has missed out on recognizing the need to equip students with media literacy skills. 

As educators, we’ve seen students defending Whatsapp forwards as the truth, sharing misinformation on Instagram and believing polarising content. The repercussions of our future leaders consuming such content today is a threat to democracy, peace and harmony. 

Without critical and independent thinking skills, and reliable information- students are unlikely to become active global citizens and informed decision makers.

The News Didi WhatsApp chatbot will facilitate India’s first media literacy intervention delivered at scale. For the pilot program, our chatbot will deliver engaging, bite size, media literacy modules to 500 students on a weekly basis for a period of 6-8 weeks. The online intervention will be supplemented by engaging in-classroom activities to drive student engagement.

This will empower them to become responsible consumers of media, with the ability to source accurate information to make informed decisions for their development and a better India.

Through the News Didi chatbot intervention and our demonstrated ability to create media literacy content, our goal is to uncover evidence of (a) poor media literacy levels (b) mastery of media literacy skills as a result of the program. We aim to use this data to advocate for media literacy training to reach all students across India.

Our target population is students from grades 6-12 in diverse school systems across India. We want to invite participation from not just students in public school, whose education costs are borne by the government, but also those in low-income private schools, paying as little as Rs.1000 or $12 as fees for an academic year.

While the COVID-19 pandemic widened a digital divide that already existed, students now have access to a smartphone, but are unaware of the plethora of media messaging that they are now exposed to on a daily basis.

We have seen an update of our education policy in the National Education Policy, 2020, and though the policy emphasizes a focus on 21st century skills for the Indian school student, media literacy is not recognized as one of these skills, and has hence, still not found a place in education curricula. This lack of prioritization translates to the absence of any media literacy education for students.

According to Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) 2020 data, when examining how students received learning material during the pandemic, WhatsApp was the most common medium through which activities and materials were received. This was higher among children in private schools (87.2%) than in government schools (67.3%). Hence, by providing students access to media literacy skills through a WhatsApp chatbot, we aim to fill the media literacy skill gap in school students in India.

Via News Didi brings together my founder, Asmita and my work experiences as Teach for India teaching fellows in 2 Indian cities, Delhi and Bengaluru. Our work at Teach for India helped us get a keen sense of how students learn in public school systems, the challenges they face, and their needs. Our academic backgrounds combine knowledge in Public Policy and Education to help us not only design engaging learning programs, but also enable their inclusion into school curricula, while bringing subject matter expertise and research skills to our work. 

Through our education consultancy wing, Empower-ed, we have worked on 2 additional education programs, the OXFAM Equality Clubs and YLAC Digital Champions. The former has helped us develop the skills and insights to execute and monitor learning programs for students effectively, while the latter has given us the experience of implementing a self-paced digital literacy program for students.

Via News Didi is currently part of an incubation program called InnovatED, that helps early-stage entrepreneurs from Teach For India looking to take their innovations from the project or prototype stage to a sustainable organization. I am also an UNLEASH Global Innovation Lab talent, and have attended the UNLEASH 2022 Lab held in Mysuru, India, which gave me the opportunity to participate in a human-centred design thinking process to innovate and solve for the Sustainable Development Goals. 

Lastly, we work with several part-time team members who are children in grades 6-12. This helps us design programs that are representative of the demographic they serve, and informed by their needs and challenges. Our Design Lead, Aarya (who’s also in Grade 11) was a 2022 Student Leader and Cohort member of the Kids Education Revolution Learning Loop, a platform that allowed her to showcase her journey and her work with us at Via News Didi.  

Via News Didi has conducted surveys with students and educators to understand the problems they face with news and media literacy better. 

Nearly 65% of educators surveyed said that they struggled to take the news and media to their classrooms because there was a lack of resources, student or teacher-friendly, that could help them do this.

66% of students surveyed stated that they had come across fake news when browsing online, and 70% of students surveyed confessed that they had either shared fake news at some point in time, or were unsure if they had shared fake news in the past. Students also reported struggling with ‘finding reliable sources of information’, ‘figuring out if the news is fake or not’, and ‘avoiding news driven with a political agenda’.

As part of our other programs, we have also worked with close to 80 students on a media literacy and journalism focussed program, where students learn principles of media literacy and journalism from media mentors. They also set up publications and educate their audience on propaganda, misinformation, fake news, and even their tips on how to fight these!

We have also authored an under-consideration book chapter titled, ‘Youth and Information Literacy’, to be published in “Youth Development: International Perspectives”, a Springer Publications volume. This was part of a project led by Professor Sibnath Deb, Director, Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development.

1. Access to Media Literacy: Media literacy is a significant challenge for many countries across the world, and more so for India, since there are no organizations working on media literacy, and the size of our target population is vast. WhatsApp chatbots have shown good results in the Indian education landscape, with companies scaling from 0.5 million to 10 million students in seven months. Hence, our NewsDidi chatbot is well-positioned to deliver media literacy modules at scale to learners. 

2. Collaborative Approach to take Media Literacy to learners everywhere: Many ed-tech organisations using them to implement learning modules with students. Since some of these organizations are already working with students at scale, we wish to partner with these organizations to deliver a tested, robust media lit program to the learners they serve. 

3. Advocate for all students to be media literate to create greater adoption of media literacy programs: Since media literacy is still relatively unknown in India, we also wish to use the results from our chatbot program to create a learning report, and advocate for media literacy skills to become part of the curriculum in Indian schools.

Through the News Didi chatbot, we aim to reach 10000 learners, and ensure that they become:

1. Critical thinkers

• Students will be able to analyse media messages to gather accurate, relevant information about their society

• Students will be able to discern the agenda behind media messages, and gauge the impact that this may have on their perceptions of the situation/message.

2. Creators and communicators 

• Students will be able to develop and share their unique perspectives on social issues

• Students will be able to create innovative media messages to inspire social change

3. Active citizens and agents of change

• Students will be able to critically access and analyse diverse information on which to base their democratic participation 

• Students will be able to understand and address issues within  their communities by deconstructing media messages and sourcing accurate information for themselves and others

To ensure that we meet our goal of impacting 10000 learners by 2024, we also want to engage in 

1. Establishing Partnerships 

• Via News Didi will establish partnerships with ed-tech organisations that have pre-existing WhatsApp enabled teaching and learning programs, to reach our target of 10,000 learners.

2. Media Literacy Advocacy 

• Via News Didi will create a report that illustrates baseline media literacy levels and growth in media literacy competencies as a result of the News Didi chatbot program.

To participate in the Media Literacy Program, students will engage with a chatbot that will interact with them and provide them with media literacy skills.

A chatbot is a software that simulates human-like conversations with users via chat. Its key task is to answer user questions with instant messages. Chatbots used for educational purposes can be used as learning assistants, and they can provide instant feedback to students while also tracking their progress through the learning program. 

Using a chatbot will not just help us design conversation flows to impart the curriculum, but also allow us to embed a diversity of engaging content for learning, like videos, quizzes, and even worksheets for sustained learning.

The chatbot will also help us track learning outcomes, and gather feedback about the effectiveness of our learning material, so that we can make constant improvements to the program. 

We are facilitating this interaction via WhatsApp. Multiple educational surveys have found that WhatsApp is being extensively used as a medium for teaching and learning, not just in private schools, where 87.2% children received learning materials via WhatsApp, but also in government schools, where 67.3% children received learning materials during the pandemic (ASER, 2020). India-based ed-tech organizations like The Apprentice Project, Slam Out Loud and ConveGenius have seen great success in using WhatsApp chatbots for their learning programs.

In the Pilot phase, we wish to impact 500 students from Grades 6-12 across 10 government school classrooms and 10 classrooms in one low-income private school. As we scale, we wish to take this number up to 10,000 students by 2024 through partnerships with ed-tech organisations.

As we see it, there are 4 main barriers that we may encounter in executing the program:

• The ChatBot may have limited engagement from users, which is a challenge that many tech-based interventions face.
• Stakeholders in the education sector may be reluctant to accept a media literacy program due to lack of awareness around the value of media literacy.
• There may be competition from other organisations with a greater network and access to more resources.
• Developing the chatbot and delivering media literacy modules at scale will require us to raise significant financial resources.

We are currently part of an Incubation Program called InnovatED, which helps early-stage entrepreneurs from Teach For India looking to take their innovations from the project or prototype stage to a sustainable organization.

For our Re-Imagining Media Program, we partnered with Youth Ki Awaaz, India's largest student writing platform, with a community of over 136K bloggers and 4 million+ monthly readers. Student participants in the program published their articles on the youth and their relationship with the news, misinformation and fake news, and even their tips to fight propaganda, on the platform.

Partnering with government bodies will allow us to implement the program with a large number of learners and with sustained support from teachers to drive participation and engagement.

Partnering with organisations that already serve learners through WhatsApp chatbots or similar programs will allow the News Didi chatbot program to reach a larger audience.

We intend to create the News Didi chatbot as an open-access tool, which will allow schools and educators to leverage the program and take it to learners across the country.